I press my body as close to the door of the car as I can to distance myself from Mark and all that temptation, but he won’t have it. He sits in the middle, clicks a button that throws up a black divider between us and the driver, and arranges our bodies so we’re sitting the exact way we sat when this same car took us from the concert at Mandalay Bay back to Mark’s place at the Mandarin Oriental.
His hand is on my thigh, and my arms are wrapped around his arm, hugging it to me. He sits with his legs apart, his knee brushing against mine, and I sit with my legs together, like a good girl. I don’t feel very good right now, though.
“I can’t do this,” I say by way of protest. “Let me out. I need to drive myself home. Alone.”
The Yukon lurches forward, and we’re in motion. I sigh and untangle my arms from around his. I cross my arms over my chest, but he doesn’t move his hand from my thigh nor his knee from beside mine. I pick up his hand and place it on his lap, careful not to touch any other part of his body.
“Go sit over there,” I say, nodding across the small space at the row of seats facing us.
He chuckles and scoots over a few inches. “You can have your space.”
“Gee, thanks.”
We’re quiet for a few beats, each staring out our respective windows, and I wonder what in the actual fuck he’s doing.
I finally turn and look at him. “You’re not like I thought you’d be.”
His eyes find mine. “What did you think I’d be?”
“Honestly, I never thought I’d get the chance to meet you. Everything I’ve read and heard about you tells me you use women for sex, but you don’t seem that way with me.”
“What have you heard?”
“Magazines tell me you’re with a different woman every night. Twitter tells me you’re proud of it.”
“An English teacher who believes everything she reads,” he muses.
“Don’t give me that shit. Deny it, then.”
“I can’t deny some of it, but you’re only seeing what my publicist wants you to see, like the whole exhaustion thing I told you about.” He makes air quotes around the word exhaustion, and I remember how he confessed that secret to me—just me. “I don’t even have a Twitter account.”
“Yes, you do.”
He unlocks his phone and tosses it on the seat between us. “Show me.”
I’m highly tempted to look at his phone. What apps does a rock star have? It’s a stupid, random thought that makes me sort of realize he’s kind of like everyone else—just hotter and richer.
I don’t touch it, though. It feels too personal. Instead, I pull up his Twitter account on my phone and hand it over to him.
He glances through, narrowing his eyes at some, chuckling at others. “I’ve never written a single one of these. Why are they all so short?”
“You can’t use more than a hundred forty characters.”
“Why not?”
I lift a shoulder. “That’s the limit.”
He scrolls some more, reading through the posts he supposedly made that someone else made on his behalf. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“What?”
He flashes my screen at me. Maggie Westin is trouble AF and I like it.
There’s a picture underneath with Mark looking out of it and a very drunk Maggie Westin hanging on him.
“What’s wrong with that?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “Didn’t you see the media shit storm a few months ago linking us?” I nod, and he looks pissed as he holds up the phone as if its evidence. “Looks like my fucking publicist started the whole damn thing.”
“Because of the tweet?”
“Because she posted a picture of us together and it looks like I posted it. What the fuck does AF mean?”
“Are you, like, seventy-four and just look really good for your age?”
His brows draw in. “What are you talking about?”
“How do you not know what common slang means? How do you not know how to tweet?”
“AF is not common slang.”
“It’s common AF.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?” I ask innocently.
He narrows his eyes at me. “I still can’t believe Penny pulled this shit. Fuck. I should call her now and fire her.”
“AF means as fuck.”
“So I called Maggie trouble as fuck? What does that mean?”
“Like she’s a lot of trouble and you like the sort of trouble you can get into with her. And the picture sort of hits that point right out of the park.”
He nods slowly. “Teach me more slang.”
I laugh. “I feel like a rock star should have that part down.”
“You’d think, but I’m really just a seventy-four-year-old man parading around as a rock star.” He hands my phone back to me. “I don’t think I want to read any more.”
“What about Facebook? Do you have one of those?”
“I did, and then the band got popular and I deleted it.”
“Why?”
“My agent at the time advised against posting anything online that could negatively affect my public image, and rather than take the chance of posting something stupid or drunk or both, I got rid of it.”
“Do you ever miss having a normal life?”
He lifts a shoulder and averts his gaze to the landscape passing us by out the window. “I’ve been in a band since I was in high school. We were signed when I was in my early twenties. I’m not totally sure I know what normal even means.”
I didn’t think I could feel bad for the man who seems to have it all, but I suddenly realize that having it all might not be as glamorous as it seems.
“My publicist handles all my social media. If I need to get in touch with someone, I text or call. Besides, there’s so much negative shit out there. I don’t need to read the reviews that say we played like shit or my voice sounded like I was gargling sandpaper.”
“Someone said that?” I frown.
He nods. “All the fucking time.”
“That’s just not true.” I think about how beautiful his voice is and can’t imagine anyone ever saying anything bad about his singing.
“Except the one time I actually did gargle with sandpaper.”
“I bet you still sounded on point.”
“On point AF?”
I laugh. “Close enough. What about Instagram? Snapchat?”
“Insta-who? Snap-a-what?”
“Okay, I’ll get you set up on Snapchat.” I hold my hand out for his phone and walk him through setting up an account.
“What does it mean if I click My Story?”
“Don’t press that,” I say sharply.
He looks so scared that I actually giggle.
“It’ll post the picture publicly. You don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then anyone who follows you will be able to see it.”
“Yeah, bad idea.” He stares down at his phone as he weighs the implications of that. He isn’t just some guy learning how to use some new social media platform. He’s Mark Ashton.
He picks up the concept quickly and sends a test Snap to me. It’s just a picture of his face next to me in the back of his Yukon, and I screenshot it—mostly to show him what happens if you screenshot a snap. Not at all because I want that picture saved to my own camera roll.
Right. Even I don’t believe the lies in my own head.
We play with Snapchat filters for a bit, laughing together as the urban development out the window turns into an endless desert and Mark sends me a snap of the two of us wearing flowers in our hair. I can’t help it. I screenshot that one, too.
I don’t even realize we’re already halfway home and we’ve gotten nowhere so far—well, with the exception of Mark having a Snapchat account and me feeling like myself around him instead of an obsessed fangirl.
“So why did you kidnap me for a five-hour ride back to Vegas?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I wanted a lesson in Snapchat.”
“Be serious.”
He looks uncomfortable for a beat. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you really come to Phoenix, Mark?”
“The heat.”
I roll my eyes.
“I can’t explain it. I needed to see you.”
“Why?”
He lifts a shoulder and shakes his head as if the whole idea perplexes him, too. “I’ve already told you, Reese. You’re different.”
“But how?”
“It’s this connection I have with you. I can talk to you. I can be honest with you.” He lowers his voice so the next part comes out all husky and sexy. “And the sex. Your kiss. Your skin. Your mouth on me.” He shakes his head.
“Is this just some game to you?” My voice starts rising as my blood boils with anger. How can he sit there and say these things to me when I know what I know? “See how many of Brian’s girlfriends you can fuck?”
He grimaces, and even with his features twisted, he’s still the most handsome man I’ve ever laid eyes on. “No,” he says through gritted teeth. “What happened with Kendra...it wasn’t intentional. I’ve paid my penance to make it up to him and I still feel like shit about it.” He fixes his eyes out the window. “I don’t go after Brian’s women. If anything, it’s the other way around. It’s not what you think.”
“Then what is it?” I’m yelling now, and I don’t even care. I’m pissed. How dare he come all the way to my parents’ damn house in Phoenix to antagonize me?
“I can’t stop thinking about that night. About you.” His voice is so full of sincerity that it’s hard not to buy what he’s selling. There’s a hitch in his breath, a change in his tone over his last two words: About you. His pain is palpable, but I’m too angry, too fired up to focus on it.
“And you think locking me in a car with you for five hours is going to change that?”
He barks out a laugh. “No, but it might help me sort through the shit storm in my head.”
“Brian told me you make women think you’re in for more than a night but it’s not really true.”
He winces at the mention of his brother’s name coming out of my mouth. “Brian doesn’t know jack shit about me.”
I raise an eyebrow and lower my voice. “He told me how you tell women you’re going to write songs about them.”
He blows out a breath. “I’ve never said that to a woman. Not once.”
“You said it to me.”
He shakes his head. “No I didn’t. Have I written songs about relationships? Of course. But I’ve never deliberately told a woman I’d write a song about her. I’ve never wanted to give a woman that sort of claim over something so close to my career. That night I was with you, I wrote down some words that spoke to me. I didn’t tell you I’d write a song about you.”
Heat creeps into my cheeks. “Oh. I…uh…”
He stares out the window. “I did, though.” He turns back to me. “Write a song about you, I mean. And I played a riff publicly and it was incredibly well received.”
“You played a riff publicly? Where?”
“I crashed a concert and tossed out a few bars of it as an experiment. The crowd went crazy. Steve showed me an article the next day that someone wrote about how it—”
He interrupts himself and pulls out his phone. He taps the keys for a few beats and then hands it over to me. I read the headline. Love Looks Good on Vail’s Mark Ashton.
“Love?” I say, reading the headline.
He shrugs. “According to the article.”
“What about according to you?”
“I hardly even know you.” He looks out the window again.
I nod. He’s right. It’s ridiculous of me to even ask.
“And that’s why I don’t understand these goddamn feelings.” He says it so softly that I almost miss it. I pretend like I don’t hear him, like I’m reading the article.
Because if I allow myself to listen to those words—his admission that he has confusing feelings for me that might feel a little like love—I’m not sure I’ll keep believing Brian’s harsh words about the way Mark treats women.
As I stare down at Mark’s phone pretending to read the article, some of the words on the screen start to register. They’re familiar words that have stayed with me, stamped on my heart in the way a lot of Vail songs are, but personal and unique in their own way.
It’s the words I remember Mark tapping into his phone when we were in the back of his Yukon headed toward his place. When my eyes focus on those four little words, I read the entire article.
“A Little Like Destiny.” Those were the words Mark Ashton repeated at his surprise performance at the Noteworthy show two nights ago at HRH’s pool venue.
I stop reading to say, “I was at that show.”
“You were?”
I nod. “We left early.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
Noteworthy front man Sebastian Cresswell and Ashton are longtime friends with a history of surprising each other on stage, not to mention their history of shared women and drunken nights. The words Ashton sang on Saturday have women everywhere distraught that his single days might be over. His ballad was forlorn and sincere. Emotions don’t run that deep without true feelings behind them, and love looks good on Ashton, or at least on Ashton’s lyrics. Who is this mystery woman inspiring his music? Only time will tell. To view the performance, click here. To read the rest of the soulful lyrics, click here.
I click on the rest of the lyrics.
The light hits your eyes
A part of me dies
A little like destiny
It’s just for one night
But it feels too right
A little like destiny
I can’t let it go
It’s starting to show
A little like destiny
The threat of tears bites behind my eyes. I want to watch the performance. I want to see him setting those words to music, belting them out the way only he can with all the talent he possesses, but I need to do it alone. I need to do it when he’s not sitting right beside me, because if I hear his pent-up emotions about me coming out of him in the form of a song while he’s in a confined space beside me, I’m not sure what’ll happen. I’m not sure I’ll be able to maintain self-control.
“I wish I could’ve seen it live,” I say.
He hums a tune, and then he murmurs the words. He isn’t belting them out like I imagined, like he probably is in the video, but he’s giving me my own acapella version right here in the back of the car.
And it’s beautiful. He sings the words quietly, soulfully, and I can’t help but admire the pure musical gift he was born with. He doesn’t look at me while he croons softly beside me, instead focusing his gaze out the window.
When he’s done, I don’t know whether to applaud or climb onto his lap and kiss him or sit quietly.
I let the quiet stir between us, and then I say, “That was lovely.” My voice shakes with the unshed tears behind my eyes.
“Thanks,” he murmurs, turning to look at me.
“What do you mean by it’s starting to show?”
He clears his throat. “I told you how I’m a disaster. I almost missed a performance the other night. That never happens. Never. Music is first in my life, always. I told you how I fucked up our opening song. It’s an amateur move. I haven’t done that shit since before we signed a record deal. A fuckload of people count on me not to fuck up, and I’m letting them down. All because my head is so fucked over you.” He focuses his gaze out the window again and lowers his voice. “Over the fact that you’re with Brian. That you chose Brian.”
My heart races. “Would it be different if my relationship was with someone else? If that man wasn’t your brother?”
He lifts a shoulder, and then he looks over at me and shakes his head sadly. “No. The end result is the same. It’s not me.”
Our eyes meet for a searing moment. His eyes blaze into mine. He wants me, wants this—right here in the back of his car, and I want it, too. I want to be sitting like we were as we traveled down the Strip, like we were today before I pushed him away. I want him close. I want to smell him, to radiate in his warmth, to feel him in my orbit.
But there’s a line between us—a clear, forbidden divider that would be immoral to cross, no matter how right it feels.
Now I’m the one looking out the window. It’s hard to concentrate with his green eyes pinning me to my seat. I think back to Jill’s words—when he looks at you with those green eyes, you do anything he asks.
I’m just not sure what he’s asking, and I’m not sure whether to go with my gut and believe that he’s being sincere or go with what my boyfriend told me about him.